By Civia Tamarkin, Director of Birthright: A War Story
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Sanctuary cities for the unborn, six-week heartbeat bans, partial birth abortion, defending life...the Thinkspeak is spinning overtime. And winning. Those who favor forced pregnancy and government control of childbearing have co-opted the language and the messaging and those of us who support reproductive freedom have allowed them to control a winning narrative.
They talk about execution of babies, genocide and an American holocaust, while we remain mired in the old-fashioned, losing lexicon of choice. In the battle between the visceral and the intellectual, the tangible images of babies and the abstraction of individual rights, the opposition has manipulated the messaging with terrifyingly triumphant Trumpian untruths.
It doesn't seem to matter that the majority of the public supports an individual having personal control of reproductive health decisions. The majority is as weak on messaging as the Democratic Party. The majority has not stood up to the rhetorical sleight of hand and outright lies of the anti-abortion movement any more than the facts have stood up to the more than 16,000 falsehoods tweeted and uttered by Donald Trump.
For most of the country, Roe v Wade is on the brink of extinction and while the fight is now in the U.S. Supreme Court, the likelihood is that access to the full spectrum of reproductive health care will fall back to the states and fail.
We must take back the fight. We must take back the narrative. We must stop talking about choice and start shouting about women's health, women's lives and about women dying. That is the most pro-life message. As the reproductive justice moment has been calling out for decades, there is no choice when there are no options. For women dependent on Medicare, for women who do not have means or access to reproductive healthcare options, there is no choice. Perhaps that is why the ProChoice movement can't rally an actively aggressive army. Hell, we can't even convince women to stop shopping at Hobby Lobby.